Computing

I generally don't care for the poetics of life. When I'm walking down the street and something poetic happens - sunlight piercing rainclouds, golden leaves dancing in an autumn wind - I just go "ehh." But human emotion is quantifiable, meaning it can be taught to computers. A collaboration between MIT's Lab for Social Machines and McKinsey's Consumer Tech and Media team want to use film to quantify and "teach" emotions to computers in order to create AI that can tell emotional stories.

Back at WWDC 2017 in June, Apple teased us with the iMac Pro, its most powerful desktop yet. But for months, there was barely a peep about when it might available. Now we know it's definitely going to be available before the end of the year (unlike the HomePod), when it goes on sale later this week on Friday, December 15.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - Earlier this week, representatives from automotive and airline companies, big banks, software companies, and the US military met to learn the basics of quantum mechanics at NASA. And that was only a small part of it.

When it comes to satisfying the needs of the PC master race, there's no such thing as too much. That's why Nvidia went and created the $US3,000 Titan V, which the company is calling the most powerful graphics card ever created. Then, Nvidia went and painted it gold, so you wouldn't confuse it with any of those other pedestrian GPUs.

For the longest time, Apple’s customers have pointed to the Cupertino company’s “better” security as a reason to ditch Windows and move into their walled garden. But the security landscape has changed and we are facing new threats. Recent events suggest Apple’s supposed security superiority is being eroded by smarter bad guys and errors coming from Apple’s development team.

A few months after demonstrating its dominance over the game of Go, DeepMind's AlphaZero AI has trounced the world's top-ranked chess engine - and it did so without any prior knowledge of the game and after just four hours of self-training.

If you're playing buzzword bingo out there, you can check AI off from your cards for about the billionth time this year. Google continues to find ways to integrate AI with changes made to their spreadsheet app Sheets. The software has been updated with AI that looks at your data and makes suggestions, by using "machine intelligence", on how to best analyse and visualise your data.

For years, Microsoft and others have been trying to figure out how to get Windows running on chips other than x86 processors most commonly made by Intel and AMD. The hope is that by broadening the platform to makers of mobile devices, Windows on ARM-based chips will lead to cheaper, more accessible systems than the standard laptops we have now.

If you're like most people, you do not like Wall Street or the financial industry. Well, some news from the Nordic region: Our new robot overlords might wipe the $1 billion grin off the industry's face in the coming years.

Windows has been knocking around in some form or another for a grand total of 32 years now, and in that time it's amassed a lot of features - not just the newest bells and whistles but long-standing features you might have forgotten about or never even discovered in the first place. Here are 10 really useful tricks that Windows 10 is capable of that you might not know about, but should definitely know about.

Portable hard drives seem like they're bound to go way of the dinosaur, thanks to the rise of services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. But if you wanted to take a large file home with you back in 1985, you didn't have quite so many options. Your best bet? Maybe this hard drive from Maynard.

Russian security software company Kaspersky Lab has been having a bad few months amid allegations its signature anti-virus software scans for and identifies files of interest to Russian cyber spies. Kaspersky publicly contends a high-profile incident in which it allegedly stole classified files from a National Security Agency contractor's computer was due to dumb mistakes on that individual's part, but that hasn't stopped the US government from banning the use of the company's products at federal agencies.

Video: Starting a new hobby usually requires a hefty investment in both time and equipment, but when 77-year-old Tatsuo Horiuchi retired and wanted to take up painting, he passed on the pricey brushes, paint and canvases, and decided to use an app already installed on his Windows PC: Microsoft Excel.

The web is littered with trackers that are designed to log your browsing movements and feed the information back to third parties. While this info is generally used for fairly innocuous things, like determining which ads to display when you surf, more malicious parties are also out there and are eager to take a peek at your searching behaviour.

Everybody knows that computers were huge and unwieldy in the middle of the 20th century. But a lot of the tech terminology that we take for granted today had to be invented at some point. Such is the case with the term "desktop computer", which emerged long before "personal computers" became commonplace in homes.

Apple just released a patch that fixes a recently revealed security vulnerability in macOS High Sierra. This is the bug that let anyone gain admin access to Mac accounts without typing in a password. It's a bad one. Good news is that Apple is making it very easy to update your software and squash the bug. Just click the "Update" box when you see it!

In software, there are bugs, and there are dangerous bugs. It looks like macOS High Sierra has one of those dangerous bugs; one that could give someone full access to virtually any user account. And holy buckets, it is scary.

I'm sitting here, looking at a screen that's way too tall, waiting, seconds turning into minutes, just so I can log into Windows. Thank god I didn't have to cold boot. Five minutes later, when my laptop finally approaches a functioning state, I reach down to move the mouse cursor over the Slack icon only to be greeted with a bare patch of hard black plastic - then I remember my 11-year-old Thinkpad doesn't even have a touchpad. This isn't going to be nearly as fun as I thought. Do I even try to install Photoshop? Screw it, let's go nuts. But before getting any deeper in this wasteland of retro tech, let me backup and explain how I got here.